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Saturday, July 16, 2016

Countdown to Hiroshima, X-Minus-21 Days: Unholy Trinity and the Birth of the Atomic Age

While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6,
1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima,
it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New
Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its 71st anniversary
will be marked—or mourned today.

Entire books have been written about the test, so I’ll just touch on
one key issue here briefly (there’s much more in my book with Robert Jay
Lifton, Hiroshima in America, and my own recent book and ebookAtomic Cover-Up).
It’s related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new
government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear
program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era.

In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project
scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren’t sure
exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the
bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, “The Father of
the Bomb,” worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the
radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain.

Indeed, scientists warned of danger to those living downwind from the
Trinity site but, in a pattern-setting decision, the military boss,
General Leslie Groves, ruled that residents not be evacuated and kept
completely in the dark (at least until they spotted a blast brighter
than any sun). Nothing was to interfere with the test. When two
physicians on Oppenheimer’s staff proposed an evacuation, Groves
replied, “What are you, Hearst propagandists?”

Admiral Williams Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff—who opposed
dropping the bomb on Japan—placed the bomb in the same category as
“poison gas.” And, sure enough, soon after the shot went off before dawn
on July 16, scientists monitored some alarming evidence. Radiation was
quickly settling to earth in a band thirty miles wide by 100 miles long.
A paralyzed mule was discovered twenty-five miles from ground zero.

Still, it could have been worse; the cloud had drifted over
loosely-populated areas. “We were just damn lucky,” the head of
radiological safety for the test later affirmed.

The local press knew nothing about any of this. When the shock wave
had hit the trenches in the desert, Groves’ first words were: “We must
keep the whole thing quiet.” This set the tone for the decades that
followed, with tragic effects for “downwinders” and others tainted
across the country, workers in the nuclear industry, “atomic soldiers,”
those who questioned the building of the hydrogen bomb and an expanding
arms race, among others.

Naturally, reporters were curious about the big blast, however, so
Groves released a statement written by W.L. Laurence (who was on leave
from the New York Times and playing the role of chief atomic propagandist) announcing that an ammunition dump had exploded.

In the weeks that followed, ranchers discovered dozens of cattle had
odd burns or were losing hair. Oppenheimer ordered post-test health
reports held in the strictest secrecy. When W.L. Laurence’s famous
report on the Trinity test was published just after the Hiroshima
bombing he made no mention of radiation at all.

Even as the scientists celebrated their success at Alamagordo on July
16, the first radioactive cloud was drifting eastward over America,
depositing fallout along its path. When Americans found out about this,
three months later, the word came not from the government but from the
president of the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, who
wondered why some of his film was fogging and suspected radioactivity as
the cause.

Fallout was absent in early press accounts of the Hiroshima bombing
as the media joined in the triumphalist backing of The Bomb and the
bombings. When reports of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki afflicted
with a strange and horrible new disease emerged, General Groves, at
first, called it all a “hoax” and “propaganda” and speculated that the
Japanese had different “blood.” Then the military kept reporters from
the West from arriving in the atomic cities, until more than a month
after the blasts, when it controlled access in an early version of
today’s “embedded reporters” program.

When some of the truth about radiation started to surface in the U.S.
media, a full-scale official effort to downplay the Japanese death
toll—and defend the decision to use the bomb—really accelerated, leading
to an effective decades-long “Hiroshima narrative.” But that’s a story
for my Atomic Cover-Up book—which also covers the suppression of film shot by the US Army in Hirohsima and Nagasaki—and for another day here.

is author of a dozen books (click on covers at right), including the new "THE TUNNELS: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill." He was the longtime editor of Editor & Publisher. Email: epic1934@aol.com. Twitter: @GregMitch

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About Me

is author of a dozen books (click on covers at right), including the new "THE TUNNELS: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill." He was the longtime editor of Editor & Publisher. Email: epic1934@aol.com. Twitter: @GregMitch